Cover those Taters!

As your potatoes begin to sprout and come out of the ground make sure that you are covering them with shovel or trowel(depending of the plant size) full piles of dirt.  This allows you to grow potatoes in looser dirt while not having to dig a deep hole when you harvest in the fall.  I do a daily run through checking for new sprouts and covering with dirt.  I continue to cover the potatoes daily until I can't anymore due to the hill being too tall for the row space provided, or when I run out of dirt.

Tricks to Try Again

In previous posts I talked about a method planting potatoes in straw, planting carrots on toilet paper, and adding epsom salt when planting tomatoes. All planting tricks that I will be trying this coming year. Here's why:



Potatoes in Straw




First of all it worked I got a decent potato crop from the small section. The best part about it was harvesting. All I had to do, to harvest the potatoes was sift through the straw and pull them out. The potatoes were also in a nice uniform size. This year I plan to plant a whole row to see the difference between other rows.




Carrots on Toilet Paper

I will never plant carrots differently. I had doubts that white glue would work it did but this year I will be using a flour paste. The only other change I will make is gluing the carrot seeds closer since they had far more space than they needed.

Tomatoes and Epsom Salt

Best tomatoes I have ever planted. I had very little disease is any unlike years past. The fruit was very high quality as well nice and firm. Definitely an improvement on bottom end rot.

Planting Potatoes

I have tried potatoes a couple years but this year I have talked to a few people who have made some good suggestions so here are some suggestions for planting potatoes. Past years I have simply dug some 6-12 inch holes and then made attempts to pile dirt up on them. This year I am going to try a couple tricks.

This year I took some advice from a neighbor who plants a lot of potatoes. He digs a hole deep enough to plant the potato and then covers the potato. I did this digging a small furrow to keep them in line, planting them about 12 inches apart. Potatoes grow better the deeper you can grow the hard part is piling all that dirt on them. So this year instead of letting the plants grow really tall and then piling dirt I am going to do it as the come up one little handful at a time. The past week I have had little plants popping up and each day I have buried them with a handful of dirt this way the potatoes can grow in looser soil which produces larger potatoes. Well at least that is the first plan for planting this year.

The other plan is the Straw Method, a method which was mentioned to me by a colleague at school, and after doing some research, mainly the link above, I decided to give it a go with a small section of a row. I will make periodic posts throughout the season updating on the straw method progress.